Currently, the telecommunications industry is rapidly deploying and developing distributed communications networks to provide data communications to personal mobile computing and communications devices, such as to cell phones, pagers, hand-held and laptop computers, wearable computers, vehicle-based computers, and so on. These distributed communications networks provide a communications medium over which information service providers can deliver individually personalized or customized information, such as stock quotes, sports scores, news articles, etc., via data/text, voice and/or video messages (e.g., email, instant messaging, voice messaging, etc.) to the users' personal mobile devices.
In the near future, it will be desirable for the information service providers (and advantageous to the users) to provide information services that further deliver contextually relevant information to individual users. In other words, the services provide information relevant to the user's current context (e.g., location, activity, setting, social/business relationships, etc., as well as personal preferences). For example, a contextual information service may deliver a notification that a social acquaintance is physically nearby when the user is off-work in a public place, or that a business contact is scheduled to attend a same event as the user, among many others. As another example, a contextual information service may deliver a weather or news report localized for the user's present geographical location, or in anticipation of the ski or golf outing on the user's calendar.
When such contextual information services are operated on a large-scale (herein termed a “context megaservice”), the information service likely will require processing queries on large collections of sensitive personal information (e.g., location, preferences, circle of friends, etc.). Further, for purposes of scaling performance to a large scale operation, this processing may be distributed across many server computers, including on servers operated by various different entities (e.g., other information providers).
For many people, such large-scale distributed processing of personal information raises privacy concerns. Many people therefore will be reluctant to disclose personal data to anybody other than (at most) a few trusted entities. Such concerns may limit the adoption and scale of context megaservices, despite their potential utility to the users.